


wrote a story and changed the ending

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 13:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2694725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They play for power whether they are Time Lords or executives. An office romance AU. (Or is it?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	wrote a story and changed the ending

He's buttoning his shirt while she re-touches her eyeliner, dark, thick lines that colour in her contours, making her look startling, making her seem almost alien. 

Her eyes are wide and her pupils shrink as she looks straight at herself in the garish light, but she’s barely paying attention, her hand practiced and efficient with the little brush and its precise delineations. It’s a kind of mystery to him, this masking of the features that women insist on, a lie that their faces do. He finds it unnerving knowing that the person he sees in the lift lobby and across the conference room and through the perfect, clean glass of her office window isn’t the same woman as the one who wakes up in the morning, the one who tucks herself under down and over cotton at night, the one he has the privilege to hold in his arms (and pin under his body, and warm with his mouth) on an afternoon sometimes, if he’s good, if he plays the game.

It’s never long enough before he’s standing in this exact point in time and space again, dressing himself, layering on the iconic armour of dress shirt and waistcoat and jacket, lacing his brogues last thing. His look. Like her, he has a costume, a role he’s meant to play; he’s a character in a story that doesn’t have room for what he wants and for what he doesn’t want to give up (not like this, not at gunpoint). 

He looks at her through the mirror, eyes lowered, pretending to focus on his own hands at his collar. She’s almost finished, and then they’ll have to go. He’s only allowed this much, it’s within the bounds of the narrative, an executive having it off with the other woman in a hotel before returning to the boardroom and the loneliness of the top floor, while she vanishes from his life as suddenly as she appeared in it. 

“I can see what you’re doing, my dear.”

Startled, he realises she’s put down her tools and met his eyes in the mirror, peering at him askance. She’s blinking up from under lengthened eyelashes, which means she’s through her mascara as well. He’s running out of time. She’s...what, amused? Laughing? At him?

Man-eater, they call her, Queen of Evil, crazy, dangerous, the psychopath in the executive suite. But alone with him, her hair wild around her shoulders, her stilettos lost beneath the bed, she’s none of that (or she’s all of it and it doesn’t matter). She’s known him since he was a boy, since before the uniform and the makeup and the battles that have changed them both and the losses that have carved up the lives they thought they’d live. 

He shakes his head minutely, frowns at her. “What am I doing?”

“Being an idiot.”

Moments like these, he thinks he loves her. He knows she loves him. Moments like these, he thinks, what if we shut the door on expectation? What if we just left it all behind, all the responsibility and the history and the people depending on us and ran, travelled the world, just her and me, I’ve seen it before but we could see it together, I never wanted to be chief executive, and she should never have become my subordinate (and certainly not my mistress), it’s killing her.

Then there are the other moments he knows better. She’s as safe as she can ever be under his watchful eye, and heaven knows she’s brilliant at her job. She’s saved his hide (his soul), and the company, more than once. But she is crazy, unhinged by the choices life has made, and she’ll never forgive him for what he’s taken from her, and they’re not children running around unwatched on her father’s highland estate, dreaming up their own private world bigger than the outside world. He can’t have her cut loose, free to wreak havoc on his life’s work, to scheme up hostile takeovers and ruin lives. 

Which is why they’ll never run, which is why they’ll stay exactly where they are, like fixed points, until it does kill her, or him, or both of them in a fiery corporate showdown that’ll leave no survivors and no stars in the sky.

Meanwhile, there’s this. It doesn't even scratch the surface of scandal for him to have an affair with his CIO. People around the office have been whispering about the chemistry between them since the day he’d realised who his board had hired, the day she’d walked back into his life, all smiles and gasps and expectant little pauses for dramatic effect.

She carefully and deliberately applies her lipstick, still studying him fixedly. The lip colour is the penultimate step, only one thing left to do before she’s fully dressed and ready to go back to the office and their lies. It’s lurid, so red it’s like she’s painted a target on her face, and all it makes him want to do is to grab her by the back of the head and take her mouth, violent or gentle, he doesn’t know (or care) which. 

Instead, he focuses on the bones in her hand, the slimness of her wrist and fingers. Her skin is pale like she’s come back from the dead, though not half an hour ago he’d made it flushed and damp and hot like they could speak their hearts directly through touch alone.

“I’m going to go in a minute,” she reminds him. “Finish getting dressed.” Her tone is gentle, but also matter of fact. She’s resigned to this fate in a way he hasn’t been able to accept yet. Some days he thinks he can still fix this, and some days he thinks the only solution is to never see her again (when he has to be in the office take the express lift straight from the carpark to the top floor and lock himself in as though in a box, otherwise only show up to quarterly investors’ meetings; force himself never to look for her in the canteen or by the server room or silhouetted outside his door).

She stretches her arms up and behind to pull her hair into its knot--he wonders how she finds the time to go to the gym between everything else she does, and turns to admire her directly, no more looking at deflected light in mirrors. The curve of her bare neck is too much of a temptation, and enough of an excuse; he bends down to kiss her, hiding his face from her scrutiny. His cuff brushes against her clavicle.

“Get off!” 

It’s good natured but adamant, accompanied by a shrug of her shoulder and an impetuous sweeping of all her brushes and her pigments into their little bag. She gets to her stockinged feet, pivots on tiptoe, rests her palms on his chest, looks him straight in the eye. 

“Go to hell,” she says very clearly and very carefully. Then suddenly all her confidence, all her indulgent lightheartedness drops away. Her voice goes dull, and doubt is an awful thing to see on her face. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

He’s dumbstruck. He shrugs, (here in private, where this is allowed), helpless.

“I know you would.”

She grabs the makeup and drops it into her handbag with the work she never does without and the mobile she only ever puts away when she’s here, with him. She fishes her shoes from under the bed, and takes her coat from its wooden hanger, letting it rebound against the closet wall, and by the time it’s done swinging, the hotel room door has clicked shut, he’s staring at a fire escape diagram, and she’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this post: http://julie666miller.tumblr.com/post/103895933617/i-like-chemistry-between-their-characters  
> Prompted by romanadvoratrelundamngirl  
> Enabled by erya


End file.
